Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
I wrote about this problem, the problem of ebooks and the downfall of literature at An American Editor last Thursday. The article provoked a lot of controversy at various websites, with most commenters applauding the floodgate approach and deploring the gatekeeper approach to publishing. As a result of the comments and the hornet's nest I stirred, I have written a 4-part further exploration of the problem. The first article appears today at An American Editor, and the others will follow this week.
Among the questions to be resolved are these:
- What literary legacy do we want to pass on to our great-grandchildren?
- How do we find and identify the new John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, or Ernest Hemingway in the absence of a gatekeeper?
There is no question that anyone who wants to write and publish should be free to do so IF we have a way to build a consensus as to what newly published work is great literature. As it stands now, in the absence of traditional publishers we have no way to build that consensus. The idea that the Internet community can do it by word of mouth (or word of twittering) is ludicrous -- at least today.
I encourage those interested in the subject to read the articles at An American Editor and express their views. |
I've read both your articles - really interesting and thanks for cross-posting. I am certainly with you on the question of whether there is something that we might call literature, or more specifically, literary fiction - as distinct from fiction more generally. I'm not sure I'm with you on what counts as it and what doesn't, but that doesn't really matter. My real question is whether you are overestimating the influence of publishers in establishing what's in the literary canon and what's not. Obviously publishers have a role in "getting the stuff out" in the first place, and traditionally if publishers didn't do it it, usually, it didn't get done, (though there are of course exceptions). But from that point on the "taking into the canon" of this or that work or this or that author seems to be a process involving literary critics, literary scholars, other writers and, to some extent readers.
If that's right then we still have literary critics, literary scholars and other writers, so there seems to be more or less the same mechanism available as there always was. Some of these literary scholars, writers and literary critics are even engaging with the question of what "new media" means for more traditional notions of literature and the aesthetics thereof.
There is the problem of the sheer amount of stuff that gets put out now as compared with the past and I probably think that there is a bit of "the cream will rise to the top" sort of process. Most of the, ahem, non-literary fiction will have a very small readership, will not find itself reviewed in the TLS or the NYRB and will not be the subject of graduate theses in university literature departments so, in sense, it doesn't matter.
As for the question of what literary heritage we want to pass on to our grandchildren - we'll only know that when we get there!